Today we began our Design and Technology unit-Moving Vehicles. We thought about different types of vehicles and what their purpose was. We then worked with Mrs Smith to build our own moving vehicle out of Mobilo. Take a look at what we made: 

On Wednesday 9th October, 20 children from Years 3-6 competed at the Vale Finals Cross Country competition. The teams had qualified to compete at this event after winning the local partnership competition. The finals took place at Buscot Park and the course was a lot more challenging than the one in the previous round. All teams performed brilliantly and showed lots of determination and perseverance. The overall results were as follows: 

Year 3/4 girls= 9th place out of 12 teams 

Year 3/4 boys= 5th place out of 11 teams 

Year 5/6 girls= 9th place out of 11 teams 

​Year 5/6 boys= 3rd place out of 11 teams 

The Year 5/6 boys have now qualified for the Oxfordshire County Finals which will take place in December! Congratulations to all who took part and thank you to everyone who came along to support the teams. 

​In Science we have been thinking about white light and how we see colour. First to find out the colours that make up white light we shone torches through prisms as they refract a ray of light. This caused the light to separate and show us each colour within it. We discovered that white light is actually made up of all the colours of the rainbow. We then made colour spinners to consolidate this new learning about light. 

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Next we investigated how light enables us to see colour. To do this we looked through coloured filters at objects the same colour as the filter and then objects a different colour to the filter. We discovered that is we look at ab object the same colour as a filter it’s still looks the same colour. But if we look at an object that is a different colour to the filter it looks black. We then used this knowledge to write a secret message that is only visible when you look through a coloured filter. 

It’s been another busy week in Windrush class!
On Monday, we had our Harvest Celebration; the children really enjoyed this and it was lovely to have family and members of the Church join us. The class made some lovely tissue paper fruit and vegetable collages.
In maths this week we have been focusing on adding and subtracting 2-digit numbers and 3-digit numbers. We began by using Place Value grids and drawing the numbers as dienes as this clearly showed how and why numbers were exchanged. We then learnt how to use the column method for addition and subtraction; I have been so impressed with the children’s determination to challenge themselves to use the column method, and they have been remembering all of the steps really well! Next week we will be adding and subtracting two 3-digit numbers.
In English we have started a new unit of work on a collection of poems called ‘A Kid in my Class’ by the poet Rachel Rooney. We have explored two poems so far, ‘Ravenous’ and ‘The Daydreamer’; each poem is about the personality of a child in a class and we have had some great discussions about how the language Rachel Rooney has chosen reveals things about the personalities. We have also had a go at performing one of the poems and we will be meeting more of the personalities over the next two weeks!
 
This week’s spellings have been set on Spelling Shed; we will have a short test on Tuesday.
Words with endings that sound like /ch/ are often spelt –’ture’ unless the root word ends in (t)ch.
Creature
Furniture
Picture
Nature
Adventure
Capture
Future
Sculpture
Fracture
Mixture

On Thursday morning, Year 3 led Collective Worship with Year 1 and Year 2 as our audience.
The theme was ‘thankfulness’ and the children spent lots of time planning and preparing for it.
As a class, we decided that we wanted to focus on reasons for being thankful so we began the Collective Worship by sharing the different things that we are thankful for, such as food, shelter, love and money.
A group of children then retold the story of Noah, using actions and words, as they decided that Noah has lots of reasons to be thankful. I was very impressed with how well they remembered the story and how confidently they told it!
The Collective Worship ended with a prayer and we all sang ‘If I were a Butterfly’.
The class did a brilliant job!
 

We have been having great fun in class this week planning our stories based on Last Stop on Market Street. We are really looking forward to reading our stories next week after all our writing.

In Maths we have been comparing numbers and different representations of numbers, using the symbols for greater than >, less than < and equals = . For more ideas and activities, visit Twinkl and type in 'greater than less than year 2'.

Dear parents and carers,

This week in English the children have been working very hard on writing their "Glide" stories. They have mostly finished their first drafts, and are now moving into an editing and revising stage. Next week we'll be using editing stations to improve our writing, as well as thinking about how changes to our writing can affect the reader.

In maths this week we have been working on using the inverse relationship, as well as looking at using addition and subtraction techniques to solve multi-step problems. Children often find this hard, but the class have worked hard. Next week we'll be rounding off this unit with an end of block assessment, before moving on to some statistics work about line graphs.

In science this week we learnt about how the rotation of the Earth makes it look like the sun is moving through the sky. We set up an investigation on the back field to measure the changing shadows, but unfortunately, it was tidied away at the end of break! We'll set it up again next time we have a sunny day.

This week's spellings are:

• financial
• commercial
• provincial
• initial
• spatial
• palatial
• controversial
• initially
• controversially
• financially

You'll no doubt be pleased to hear that these are the last of the -tial/-cial lists- it's challenge words the week after! I have streamlined my Spelling Shed lists so that there is only one list in there at a time, which I hope will minimise confusion over which list is which.

Mrs B

Three things to ask your child this week:

1. Why does it look like the sun is moving across the sky?
2. How can you use rounding to help you estimate the answers to calculations?
3. What was hardest about writing your first draft of your story?

As part of our Geography work on our local area, we went on a village walk to see some of the key features of our village. We saw places such as the school, church, village shop, the pub, war memorial, village hall, tennis club and the park. 

In year 5, we have finished our sentence stacking for "Float", which we are really proud of! Everyone has contributed at least a sentence to this fantastic version of the story. Now we are working on the first draft of our own stories, called "Glide", based on this model text, but using different ideas. We're looking forward to sharing our completed stories with you soon!